


for thine is the kingdom

by tactfulGnostalgic



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Black Targaryens, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:08:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21984937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tactfulGnostalgic/pseuds/tactfulGnostalgic
Summary: “But in recent years, it has occurred to me from time to time that it might have made for an interesting twist if instead I had made the dragonlords of Valyria... and therefore the Targaryens... black.” —George R.R. MartinThey ride on the backs of beasts as fearsome and ethereal as any that the Westerosi have ever seen. With a word, they call down pillars of fire. They make pyres of the fields where their enemies once stood. Their hair is dark and sculpted in coronal braids, laced with silver, and their eyes are the inky violet of dusk.
Relationships: Ashara Dayne/Ned Stark, Lyanna Stark/Rhaegar Targaryen
Comments: 14
Kudos: 96





	for thine is the kingdom

**Author's Note:**

> I remember the first time GRRM dropped that quote about the Targs being Black, and I had to sit back for a moment and go, “whoa,” because that idea was _really_ interesting. Ever since, I haven’t been able to really get the thought out of my head. For one thing, it would radically change the racial makeup of Westeros, and change a cast of largely white characters to a significantly Black one, given how many noble families have some Targaryen blood. What effects would that have? How would Westerosi ideals of beauty change? (For instance, the word “fair” would have radically different connotations, right?) Or would it be largely the same? Would Westeros still draw heavily in culture and sociology from medieval Europe? (Are we still pretending that medieval Europe was all-white, anyway?) How much better would Daenerys’ plotline in Essos be? (The answer is way, way, way better.) 
> 
> Of course, all the good that comes with Black Targaryens would also come with some complications — namely, the politics of having a group of Black foreigners launch a forceful and violent invasion of a (presumably) majority-white continent and conquer it by force. At the same time, it would mean that the most famous, powerful, and generally venerated family in Westeros was, in fact, Black — and that Black families had built the civilization of Valyria, the in-world cultural equivalent of Athens or Atlantis, founded a centuries-old royal dynasty, and tamed literal dragons. Additionally, since the Targaryens don’t seem to be regarded as “settlers” in Westerosi culture — at least in the Seven Kingdoms, as obviously it’s a bit different in Dorne — their introduction to the continent appears more as a parallel to the Roman or Norman invasions of Britain than the later European invasions of Africa and the Americas. Personally, I interpret the Targaryens as allegories for the Romans, given (1) Valyria’s numerous descriptions as an epicenter of wealth, culture, and civilization, just as Rome was, (2) the fact that the success of Valyria was built on military superiority, canonically explained by the existence of dragons, and (3) Valyria’s mysterious and immediate decline, the reasons for which are still not totally clear. Still, the idea leaves a lot to unpack. This is all just to say that YMMV on this concept, and that’s OK.
> 
> Anyway, having offered this rambling prologue/disclaimer, I hope you enjoy this thought experiment. This fic is my love letter to the books that could have been.

_For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever._

—The Lord’s Prayer

* * *

i.

Aegon and his sisters arrive in Westeros with a triumvirate of dragons, and the world changes forever. 

(Dynasties will come and go, kings will live and die, and enough blood to fill a sea will someday sow the fields of Westeros. But the land will always wear the sign of the Targaryens, even when another house claims their seat of power. They are the realm’s history, and, perhaps, its future.)

They ride on the backs of beasts as fearsome and ethereal as any that the Westerosi have ever seen. With a word, they call down pillars of fire. They make pyres of the fields where their enemies once stood. Their hair is dark and sculpted in coronal braids, laced with silver, and their eyes are the inky violet of dusk.

(Three hundred years later, the Targaryens will still be known for their great beauty.)

The first maesters’ accounts name them demigods and divine vassals, champions of the Seven, come to purge the world of all its many sins. They are new gods of fire and blood. They ask for worship, and the continent kneels.

The maesters are wrong, but they could be forgiven the oversight. Aegon and his sisters are not divine. They are only very close to it.

They are descendants of the great dragonlords of Old Valyria, heirs of the first men to master monsters, and six thousand years of noble blood flows through their veins. They are strong-willed and charismatic and beautiful and brilliant, and if half of them are mad, then half of them are heroes, too, and from them will stem a line of kings to unite all of Westeros. They are indomitable; they are mysterious. No one will ever really understand how or why the dragons obey them — and many, many will try — but there is undeniably something of magic in their birthright, for this always is true: the dragons only ever bow to them.

Aegon is tall and broad-shouldered, with hair razed short like a crown of ash, and a smile that could charm water from stone. Visenya is strong and sturdy and pins her hair back in tight braids, and moves always with a warrior’s stride. Rhaenys is small and slender and full of sweetness, her skin lit with tones of gold, and always wears her hair loose, so it cradles her head in a halo of smoke.

A sword of Valerian steel hangs at Visenya’s side, and when asked for its name, she gives it with a laugh as sharp as its edge.

They carry the mark of Valyria in their eyes and their skin and their hair. This is not incidental. It is impossible to look upon them and forget their power. It is impossible to look upon them and forget their inheritance.

Westeros has never known people such as them. It has never known dragons, either. 

But it will.

* * *

ii.

The land does not welcome them immediately. They do not need it to.

The coronation of Aegon’s son is met by four simultaneous rebellions. The Vale tears itself to pieces over a fraternal squabble. A would-be prophet emerges in the Iron Islands. The Vulture King of Dorne raises a host of thirty thousand. Harrenhal becomes a problem. (This will become something of a trend). 

But the Targaryen rule holds fast.

The Faith of the Seven challenges the customs of the nobility. The best efforts of Aegon to mind the faith cannot soothe the abrasion of his two sister-queens, and the simmering fury of the High Septons ignites after his death. The holy men of the Seven have suffered the indignations of foreign kings and their foreign gods too long to abide a royal slight. When Aegon’s first two grandchildren wed each other, the Faith takes up arms for the first time in its existence.

But the Targaryen rule holds fast.

Wars erupt, blaze, and splutter out. Rebellions rise and swell and falter and die. Angry lords and scornful holy men try without success to evict their kings from power, and without fail, they meet the same end. Fire licks clean the bones of the many thousands who would see the Targaryens fall.

And the Targaryen rule holds fast.

The blood of Valyria finds its way to the rest of the realm. Its mark appears first in bastards; dark little girls and boys start to appear on the streets of King’s Landing, and then the Crownlands, and then further still. Soon, there are distinctly royal-looking peasant girls wearing their hair in the many slim braids of Queen Visenya, and boys sculpting theirs in the oiled pompadour of King Maegor. Among the gentry, the drift is slower, but it happens; the Velaryons and Arryns are the first, followed by the Rogares, the Daynes, the Blackwoods, and the Baratheons, whose issue all have blue eyes and black curls that will never quite bend to the touch of a fine-toothed comb. Inevitably — among nobility, all blood is eventually shared — many of the great houses of Westeros are soon inclined to look slightly Valyrian, in one sense or another. 

So the Targaryens become Westerosi, and Westeros becomes Targaryen.

Over the years, the family line tangles. It grows dangerous knots. Over a century after Aegon’s arrival, a glitch in the path of succession leads the royalty to go to war with each other for the first time since the existence of the Iron Throne.

They will call it the Dance of Dragons, and it very nearly ends them.

It’s a complicated story, and the maesters will harrow each other over details so long as the Citadel stands, but this much is known: Rhaenyra Targaryen was promised a throne, and yet when her father dies, her younger brother is crowned instead.

(Many mistakes were admitted in the ensuing battles, but the wiser historians maintain that the first was always in denying a Targaryen queen what she was owed. The Dance slaughtered thousands and made dragons extinct, but one struggles to think that the ghost of Queen Visenya was not smiling upon Rhaenyra, the day she went to war.)

Over the lake at Harrenhal, dragons duel each other for the first time in the history of Westeros. Two princes tear at each other in midair, and their mounts, Vhagar and Caraxes, fall from the sky.

Aegon II keeps the crown, and loses almost everything else. But still, the Targaryen rule holds fast.

Two generations later, and after yet another bloody war, it becomes apparent to everyone involved that Dorne will not be conquered. It is the last kingdom to join the dynasty, and it never kneels. Unbowed, unbent, and unbroken, Princess Mariah Martell is sent to King’s Landing to wed Prince Daeron.

However unlike the Andals it appears, Dornish blood is not Valyrian, and no one could mistake it for such. Mariah is fairer than the royal family, and her hair, although similar in color, hangs loose and heavy in a seamless sheaf of silk. Her eyes are doe-brown and wide, not violet and dark. Her son, Baelor, grows up paler than each of his cousins, and his hair never lends itself to the ceremonial braids of his house. He is often reminded, usually in whispered echoes from men at court, that he favors his mother. He knows from a very young age that he will never be a favorite. But his eyes are the shade splitting black and indigo, and the shape of his jaw is the very image of King Aegon II. And if anyone still whispers, then they are forever silenced after a fateful tourney and 

The first Dornish Prince of Westeros dies defending a commoner from his own family’s cruelty, and nobody could call him less than a Targaryen after that.

(And once again, the greatest killer of Targaryens proves itself to be other Targaryens.)

(Madness and nobility: these are the family’s inheritance. The bards sing often of the great Targaryen tyrants, but who sings of the heroes? Who remembers the princes and princesses, many of them never crowned, who laid their lives down for their people? Who fought with fire and blood, not for their own crowns and thrones, but for the safety of hedge knights and peasants?)

And still, the Targaryen rule holds fast.

The Blackfyres rebel, and nine kings start a war, and then a young knight named Barristan Selmy kills a house five generations in the making with one stroke. Jaehaerys II rules for a measly three years, and then his son, Aerys III, takes the throne.

One house has held the Iron Throne for three hundred years. It will lose it in twenty.

* * *

iii.

Rhaegar Targaryen is beautiful.

Everyone knows. It is the first thing that one notices, when introduced: his eyes are deep as starlight, his hair a neat bundle of woven locks, and his face — a sloping, angled jaw, a broad nose, and a soft flower of a mouth — is like a work of sculpture. He has long fingers, artist’s fingers, and can coax hardened knights to tears with merely his harp and his song. They say he is a musician at heart, more than he ever was a warrior, and he cares more for love than war.

In his boyhood, he is bookish. The oldest of three, he will wait seventeen years for a sibling, and by the time his younger brother arrives, he will already have a long adolescence of lonely afternoons behind him. Tutors and knights can only fill so much time. The rest of those empty hours, Rhaegar spends in the library of the Red Keep, devouring legends and stories the way a starving man does bread. Some men laugh at him for this, but their jokes never bite deep. The prince is too beloved, even in his eccentricities, to be the subject of scorn.

To the delight of his tutors, Rhaegar fills his mind with stories. Unknown to them, the stories take root, and they grow strange weeds.

He is a talented swordsman, although he takes little pleasure in it. He is the crown prince; it is expected. Any degree of excellence, no matter how remarkable, is expected. The crown prince must be good at all things, talented in all things, for by what other token does he claim the right to rule? Certainly, the expectations must have weighed heavy on him, at times, but if they did, he never objected to it. He was an ideal prince, an ideal king. He was a somber lad, reclusive, prone to disappear with a book or a lyre for hours at a time — but he was noble, and wise, and always fought well and fairly at the tourneys he attended. The realm thought little of his oddities.

(Historians will always read accounts of his childhood and ask  _why_ . Why did he do it? Was he abused by his father? Deluded by his teachers? Corrupted by some nefarious plot? Rhaegar was the kingdom’s saving grace; why would he bring it to ruin? Surely, the secret is here, in the drafty halls of a lonely prince’s childhood. Surely, if we wander these rooms for long enough, then it will appear to us.)

In one of the books in the Red Keep, there is a prophecy. It tells of a prince promised, born amidst smoke and salt, who will ‘wake dragons out of stone.’ And what hangs in the hall of the Red Keep but a row of vast dragon statues? And on the day that Rhaegar was born, when Summerhall burned, did smoke not fill the sky? Did all its witnesses not cry salt tears?

(A young boy left to his own devices will have strange ideas, and a young man who is never contradicted will tend to believe them.)

At twenty, Rhaegar is betrothed. Her name is Elia Martell, and she is lovely, and their marriage is a terrible idea.

Aerys does not trust the Dornish; by this point in his life, he trusts almost no one, save his Hand. Certainly not his only son, who is too measured, too calm, too careful with his words to curry the favor of his father, who seems to spit fire with every breath. So the prince and princess take up residence at Dragonstone instead of the Red Keep, and Elia gives birth to their daughter. Rhaenys is small and doe-eyed and perfect, with her father’s face and her mother’s hair, and when she is presented to Aerys he makes a cruel remark about her smell and hands her back.

Rhaegar is very, very slow to anger. But he speaks to his father much less, after that.

After her second child, Elia can bear no more children. She has produced a daughter and a son: this would be enough, for Targaryens of old. The dynasty is secure. One king and one queen, and a throne apiece.

But the dragon must have three heads.

He does not think of it, at first. He worries first about his father, who has tumbled over the precipice of madness into cruelty, and he worries first for the smallfolk, who always suffer the brunt of Aerys’ fury first. He writes the great lords of Westeros, sending ravens from Dragonstone in the cover of night, and invites them in secret to a meeting at Harrenhal; coincidentally, Walter Whent declares his intention to host a tourney. Royal gold funds the construction of the jousting pits and the lavish prizes, all paid covertly. It is here that he will start the movement which eventually unseats his father.

(Not quite in the way he imagined it, but still.)

There are many great knights and great families in attendance. The Baratheons, Robert especially (they say he exchanged friendly greetings with Rhaegar before the tourney, and how the gods must have been laughing then); the Lannisters, headed by the bitterly resentful former Hand of the King (Jaime Lannister is yellow-haired, green-eyed, and all of fifteen when Aerys names him a member of the kingsguard, and if the boy smiles, then Rhaegar’s face is stone cold); and of course, the Starks.

Always, always, the historians ask why: why did he do it? Elia was young and brave and beautiful, Elia who was a princess before she married a prince, Elia who had given him a son and a daughter and the unflagging loyalty of Dorne, which would back him in the wars to come against his father. How did he come to regard her as so disposable? Did he hate her? Why slight her? Why leave her? Why sentence her to a lonely death, when she had done all he could have asked?

Perhaps it is the wrong question to ask. Few who knew him would ever agree that he had willingly intended her harm; it was more likely that he simply did not think of her. The prince had been a quiet and bookish boy, adored by all of the known world, and it is doubtful whether it ever occurred to him that Elia was anything but a side character in the song of Rhaegar Targaryen.

He rides out like Azor Ahai himself in his armor, black and red and festooned with gold, and everyone in attendance cheers when he unseats Barristan Selmy, who will spend the rest of his life regretting his failure. 

The crown of blue roses is settled on the tip of Rhaegar’s lance, and he turns to face the crowd.

(Two days into the tournament, Rhaegar is sent by his father to discover the man who unseated the king’s knights with such ease, and who he claims must surely be a threat to both his reign and to his life. He finds the knight discarding her armor behind the Weirwood tree, and she will eventually prove the king right.

Lyanna Stark is short, skinny, and somewhat wild. Her face is paper-pale and hollow in the cheeks and under the eyes, the way Northerners tend to be — most of them are said to be skinny and half-rabid, with lanky, thin black hair and frames stripped of flesh by hard winters and stringent summers. She does not precisely prove them wrong. She is holding a sword when he meets her, and it suits her far more than the dress does.

She is nobody’s queen of love and beauty. Pretty, yes, but more wildling than queen.

“Don’t tell,” she says quietly. He’s seen the laughing shield, the bits of stolen armor peeking up from the dirt, and the spade she brought out to bury them with. He could bring her to his father now, and perhaps earn back some of the king’s much-needed trust. Maybe Aerys would even be merciful, upon seeing that it was a girl. He never thought much of the ones in his household, certainly.

Rhaegar tilts his head.

“I mean it,” she says. “Don’t tell.”

She’s not threatening, exactly, even with a weapon in hand. But there’s a bewildering air of readiness about her, as though she really does intend to use it if he doesn’t agree. 

Rhaegar surprises himself by feeling charmed.

“I won’t,” he promises softly.

She eyes him, wary.

“Do you mean it?”

“Yes.”

“What will you tell your father?”

He hums thoughtfully.

“Give me your shield.”

She skitters back, narrow-eyed and mistrustful.

He huffs. “I’ve promised you already, haven’t I?”

“You might go back on your word.”

“Don’t you trust me?”

“Why should I?”

“I’m an honorable man.”

“That’s what all the dishonorable men say.”

He laughs, surprising himself again. She seems struck by it, too; her eyes soften, and she lets the sword drop into the frost-glazed grass.

“Your shield,” he says, holding out a hand. “You can keep the sword, if it makes you feel better.”

She hands it over. Their fingers brush. He’s wearing gloves, but she runs hot, even through the leather.

“I’ll take this to my father, and tell him it was all I could find,” he says. “For your part, you ought to find somewhere else to be tonight. They’ll search the area, once I tell them where I found it.”

She is still wary, but she agrees, however reluctantly.

He pauses. “Can I ask you a question?”

His tone catches Lyanna off-guard. Lords tend to address their inferiors with entitlement, even if their inferiors are their sisters and promised brides. Rhaegar’s inquiry is polite, moderate, and suggests that she is entirely at liberty to decline if she so chooses.

“Yes,” she says.

“Why did you do it?”

She laughs, then, and he startles at the sound.

“The same reason you’re doing this, honorable man,” she says. Then she turns and runs into the woods, her hair free and her hem caked with dirt. Rhaegar does not leave the shade of the Weirwood until she is well and truly gone.)

They say Rhaegar only ever made one mistake, and it was at Harrenhal. Surely, historians argue, we might permit the prince — this perfect prince — the luxury of one mistake. If only it were not such a terrible mistake to forgive.

The crown of blue roses settles in the lap of a northern lady, instead of the prince’s Dornish wife, and the war begins.

(Here are the things historians will never know: how hard it is to sneak a Targaryan prince as far north as Winterfell, and how even with his hood up, he must travel only under the cover of night, for fear of being recognized. How his coloring gives him away, to barmaids who peer too closely under his cloak, to squires who glance at the sliver of skin between sleeve and glove, to a northern lady who recognizes the glint of purple eyes when they stare at her from under his hood. Conversely, how hard it is to sneak a Stark princess as far south as the Tower of Joy.

Why does she go with him? But this is a question the historians do not ask. Rhaegar Targaryen is beautiful, and brilliant, and has an artist’s gift for music. He makes the kind of song that could coax far colder birds than her down from their nests.)

(“You’d better be worth it, honorable man,” Lyanna complains, after riding for twenty miles under the cover of a heavy silk veil. And she intends it facetiously, for Lyanna says many careless things she does not mean. But Rhaegar takes it as an accusation.

“It will be,” he tells her. He does not say,  _Our children will be_ , because he knows it will make her skittish. But the dragon has three heads, and the promised prince will sing a song of ice and fire; and what is she, if not an ember of northern fire? And what is he, if not a perfect piece of southern ice?)

What can be said for Rhaegar Targaryen, in this, his darkest hour? He is a quiet and bookish man. He had a lonely childhood. Few will ever really understand him. Those who do will tell you that he puts great stock in signs and omens, listens intently to fairy tales, and he still believes in gods and heroes. To meet a wild fairy girl beneath the Weirwood would be just the sort of beginning that bards favor in their songs, and to steal her from her castle and fight a war for her sake would be just the sort of action that follows it. This is as far as the evidence takes us. What else we can make of his reasons is only conjecture.

And he loves her; this is the part that historians adore and loathe in equal measure, for it is glorious and it is ludicrous, it is elegant and it is clumsy, and it is undeniable except by the most stubborn of scholars, that he loved her, and he fought for her, and he died for her. And it does not make sense, and it does not warm the bodies of those who died for his cause or Robert’s, and it does not bring Elia Martell or her children back to life. But he did. And it means something, still.

As it happens, Rhaegar never has his three promised children by Lyanna Stark. He never even lives to see one. He dies at the Trident, and even those who fought against him will mourn the last Targaryen prince.

(Not quite the last, as it turns out. But that does not make the tragedy any sweeter.)

* * *

iv.

Jon Snow is not a Stark. This is obvious to anyone who looks at him, and this is in all likelihood the reason that Catelyn Stark will never willingly look at him.

He actually favors his mother’s side, although this is something nobody knows nor cares enough to notice. He has a strong jaw, and sharp brown eyes, and hair that falls in an unruly mop of black curls, rugged and careless and more than a little dashing. His nose is thin and Northern. He has a long face, like the Starks do, and is leanly muscled like they are. His father’s mark is far more subtle. Those who knew Rhaegar would recognize him in the polite, halting way that Jon stands, his spine ramrod-straight and his hands clasped behind his back. They might notice that the boy’s fingers, deft and slender, are better suited to strings than swords. But he is really more a Stark than his siblings, if one pays attention. 

But this is not what people see. What the idle observer will see first and lastly is that the Starks are white as bone, and Jon is not.

At Winterfell, he is never quite allowed to forget it.

To the world, he is still Ned Stark’s son. The Crownlands are by and large much darker than the North, and his mother could have been any one of millions below the Neck. In particular, however, everyone the Daynes have shared blood with the Targaryens for centuries, and Lord Stark was always said to have a fondness for the Lady Ashara.

Jon becomes gradually aware that the Lady Catelyn finds something about him objectionable, and for the first few years of his life, he does not realize what it is. As a very small boy, he mistakes her for his mother, although she takes pains to correct him on his error. She is never cruel, but never kind. He wonders often if she would not like him better if he favored the Starks just a bit more.

But he loves his so-called half-siblings, loves them desperately, loves them beyond reason, loves them like a brother born. They are his family, whatever Catelyn says, and try as she might to drive him away, he keeps coming back to them. He trains with Robb under Ser Rodrik. He plays at heroes in the snow-fields outside the castle (and if Robb gets to be Lord of Winterfell, then Jon claims the roles of Aemon the Dragonknight, and King Daeron, the Young Dragon, and Robb never argues.) He helps teach Bran to shoot, and snickers with Robb when the younger boy unerringly misses the target. He laughs when Arya bests him.

(His favorite is still Arya. He loves Robb dearly, but in every world, his favorite is Arya. She understands too well what it is to be denied everything because of a quirk of nature.)

(One day, he hears Arya complaining bitterly of being born a girl — of being judged her whole life for something she could not help — and he goes to get her a sword.)

The Northern lords, when they come to visit, often stare at him. He tries not to take it to heart. They are not hostile, precisely; or if they are, it is mixed with enough pity to prevent their acting upon it, and anyway, none of them would dare to hurt Ned Stark’s issue. But they don’t need to. Their eyes on the back of his neck are wound enough.

“Lord Stark?”

Ned inclines his head slightly, indicating that he has heard without looking at him.

Jon holds his hands tightly behind his back. “Could you please tell me about my mother?”

He is ten. They are in the stables just before dawn, where he met Lord Stark in the hopes of catching him alone.

Ned’s expression is shuttered. “It doesn’t matter.”

“I know, my lord.” Jon clears his throat. “Could you please tell me where she came from?”

“I told you, it doesn’t matter.”

“But—”

“It doesn’t. She’s dead.” Ned slings his saddle over a hook and leaves the stables, and Jon never gets any more out of him than that.

He doesn’t know where his family comes from. He knows it’s somewhere in the south, but he wants more than anything to have more than that. He wants a lineage. A history, of some kind, even if it’s not a noble one. He doesn’t have to come from a line of kings and knights. He just wants to know if somewhere in the world, there are other little boys who look like him.

When King Robert comes to Winterfell, Jon is the first to notice how much paler his children are than their father. To look at them, Jon could be more of Robert’s son than Joffrey. It’s not enough to stir whispers — Baratheons are many generations removed from their Targaryen heritage — but it is noticeable, especially to him. So is the royal children’s bright yellow hair, and their verdant green eyes. Neither of these things have appeared in Baratheons for so long as Jon can remember. But none suggest such things. That would be treasonous, and the king is not a temperate man.

“I’d have thought the princes and princess would look more like you,” Robb whispers to him, mystified, as the royal family makes its way inside the Winterfell keep.

Jon shrugs with utmost politeness. “Perhaps,” he says diplomatically, his tone as light as air. 

He sits apart from his siblings at the feast, and talks instead to Uncle Benjen.

“It’s a hard life, at the wall,” says his uncle, without remorse. “But we could still use a man like you.”

And Jon thinks: where else could a bastard come to anything, except at the end of the world? And what is a hard life, next to an opportunity for greatness that he will assuredly never have here?

And so he leaves Winterfell.

Lady Catelyn is glad to see him go. Men of the Night’s Watch have no children, claim no titles, own no lands. Never will Jon Snow’s sons or daughters lay claim to Winterfell, and never will she have to look upon the reminder of her husband’s dishonor. 

He almost resents her the unrepentant relief on her face as she waves him away from the gates, but he doesn’t. He understands. He knows Catelyn far better than she thinks he does.

Ned Stark rides south, and it’s the last time Jon sees is father. It’s the last time he sees his Robb, either — although not the last for either of his sisters, thank the gods.

At the Wall, there are men from all over Westeros. Terrible men, dishonorable men, and bastards all, but men from all over. Jon is no longer the only man named Snow, or the only bastard, for that matter. There are many who wear the look of the Crownlands. There are man who wear the look of lands Jon has never seen, but will learn. There is a boy named Samuel Tarly who is not fit for a stitch of work, but whom Jon nevertheless cares for dearly. There is a man named Alliser Thorne, who has not a kind bone in his body and hates Jon for reasons that Jon is used to, but nevertheless resents. 

And most of all, there is a man as ancient as the very brick of Castle Black, who looks terribly like him.

The maester is a crumbling skeleton. At the age of one hundred and four, he is a wire puppet held together by forces beyond Jon’s ken, a tangle of reedy limbs and draped in skin patched with black age spots. Hair like steel wool rises from the very crown of his head. Folds of flesh sag around his mouth and eyes. He shakes when he moves, trembling with the mere effort of breathing after so many years of decay. His eyes are milky and scarred over, and gaze unseeing into the middle distance. But unlike the rest of the Watch, he would never be lost in heavy snow.

Jon does not approach him. He doesn’t dare. But he watches from a distance — carefully, politely — as the maester putters about his duties. He wonders where the man came from. He wonders if it would be fitting to ask.

How desperate he sounds —  _please, sir, where do I come from?_ — and yet how hard it is to resist.

As it turns out, he doesn’t have to. The maester finds him instead.

“You’re Ned Stark’s bastard,” he says. His voice is gravel scraping against stone. A pale, withered tongue slips out to wet his cracked lips.

“Yes,” Jon says, a bit breathless.

“They say he kept you at Winterfell.”

“He did.”

“Raised you as his son, did he?”

“Yes, ser.”

“Who was your mother, do you know?”

“I don’t.”

“He never told you?”

“No.”

“Hm,” he says. He looks thoughtful for a moment, and then makes to move away.

“Ser,” Jon calls, unable to help himself— “who was your father?”

The maester hums, then cackles.

“Maekar Targaryen,” he says, and the breath is knocked from Jon’s lungs.

“You’re—”

“Aemon Targaryen. Yes. You’d thought they got rid of us, eh?”

(Everyone has forgotten him, the last Targaryen, hidden away here at the end of all things. No longer any threat to anybody. A sad remnant of the dynasty that once had been.)

“I didn’t know there were any left,” Jon says in wonderment. Aemon laughs, miserably.

(It is said that before the latter’s death, Aemon and his great-nephew were quite close. The old maester is one of perhaps a handful who could have seen Rhaegar in Jon’s face; he might have recognized the slight, arrogant twist of Jon’s mouth when he wins a bout, or the particular arch of his eyebrow he substitutes for overt disgust. In these and many other ways, Aemon might have known the second Targaryen at Castle Black. But by the time Jon arrives at the Wall, Aemon is blind, and he cannot identify Jon but for his voice — which is rough and Northern, after sixteen years in the company of Starks.)

Even as a bastard, Jon is more noble-born than most of his fellows. Among the new recruits, he is envied and hated for his skill with a sword, his ability to read and write, his elegant diction, which even with its Northern burr is still more clipped and precise than any of his fellows’. They begin to call him names. These are crueler names than anyone at Winterfell ever dared, and he becomes sullen and reclusive. The dark boy from Winterfell is no less an outsider here than he ever was anywhere else.

Except—

Alliser Thorne is an unpleasant man, but he is unpleasant to everybody. If he taunts Jon for being a bastard, then he does the same to everyone else. He is above all things a bully. Worse, he is a bully with power, and largely above reproach.

One day, Jon watches the master-at-arms knock one of the other recruits flat on his back with a cruel backhand, and an ember flares in his chest.

He crosses the courtyard without thinking. The boy’s name is Grenn, and he is a bully, and a beast, and he is twice Jon’s size, and he has spent their time together at Castle Black doing his utmost to make Jon’s life a misery. He flinches when Jon approaches.

Jon holds out his hand.

Grenn stares at it, wide-eyed. Impatiently, Jon huffs, and Grenn makes up his mind, grasps it, allows himself to be pulled to his feet.

“I can show you how to block that,” Jon says quietly, nodding at the retreating back of Alliser Thorne.

Grenn blinks.

“It’s a fairly simple move. I think you can learn it quickly, if you try.”

Ser Alliser has made a point of informing Grenn how difficult it is to drive anything through his skull, much less sparring lessons. But Jon has tried to teach Bran to shoot, and Grenn’s stubbornness is little compared to that. 

From the look on Grenn’s face, it is doubtful that anyone has ever expressed confidence in his abilities before.

Jon adds, “Then he’ll be in for a nasty surprise, next time he tries to knock you over.”

Across the courtyard, other boys have stopped to watch. Ser Alliser has, too. There is a warped, bitter smile on his face.

“I suppose you might try,” he calls. “I’d have an easier time teaching a wolf to juggle than learning that boy to fight.”

Jon looks the master in the eye. The ember ignites. The inside of his ribcage burns with fire.

“I’ll take that wager,” he says indifferently. “Shall I fetch Ghost?”

The hall explodes with laughter, officers and recruits alike. Only two men don’t laugh.

Ser Alliser stares at Jon, who stands between the man and Grenn. Jon does not move. The other boys see this, and they never forget it.

Much later, when he becomes the Lord Commander, those who cast their votes for him will be thinking of this moment. They will be thinking of the strange Lord Snow, a boy with nothing to gain and much to lose, risking his neck for a boy who never had aught but unkind words for him.

(He is his fathers’ son.)

* * *

v.

Daenerys Targaryen is the most beautiful woman in the world.

She is classically Targaryen, said by many to resemble a taller Queen Naerys. She wears her hair long and loose, in early childhood, in a tousled black mantle of curls. This will change when she meets and marries Khal Drogo, and starts to wear her war braids, adorned with customary silver bells; later still, she will adopt the traditional styles of her house, the woven crowns, the elaborate knots. But before her first marriage, she wears it long and loose and free.

Daenerys Targaryen is clever. She is a subdued child, but she learns quickly, and speaks Common, Tyroshi, and High Valyrian without difficulty, along with strains of Dothraki that she adopts after her wedding. She listens intently to people, and has an ear for cadence and insinuation. Although she is not taught in the ways of politics — the maesters of her childhood never bother to teach her, and she was born too late to benefit from her brother’s Westerosi tutors — she knows the ways of people, because she listens to them. She knows how they think, how they dream, and what they desire. And that’s all that politics is, really.

Daenerys Targaryen is kind. She holds the world in her heart, and cannot stop loving it, no matter what it does to her.

Her childhood is not an idle one. The longest she ever stays anywhere is Braavos, the free city, she spends the first five years of her life. She keeps the company of freedmen, and knows little of the world outside the city borders. She is not taught of the horrors of Slaver’s Bay, the remnants of the Valyrian slave trade, or the source of Essos’ riches. Daenerys learns these things only later. 

Essos is her home. It is the only home she has ever known. Westeros is her brother’s dream, and her brother is a tyrant.

(Daenerys cannot abide tyrants.)

Viserys is handsome, a man in Rhaegar’s image, but full of bitterness. He resents the world for denying him his birthright, and he tries to pay back in full the misfortune inflicted on him by taking it out on others; his servants, his friends, and most of all his sister, who remains his only tie to the lost continent of their empire.

He did love her, once, her brother. Once, they held each other as a storm raged overhead, and he whispered stories into her ear about the castles and kingdoms left behind them. She was barely more than a baby, and he not yet a boy of thirteen, and she felt safer with him than she had anywhere else. After all, they are the last Targaryens alive. They need each other. She needs him, to protect her against this world he tells her is so cruel.

Then he sells her to a Dothraki lord in exchange for an army, bartering away the last Targaryen princess like so much chattel, and his betrayal cuts her to the bone.

_The last two Targaryens_ , she accuses him, the night before her wedding.  _We protect each other. You promised. You promised!_

Viserys shrugs, and tells her it will be worth it, for his throne.

Khal Drogo is a mountain of a man, thickly tattooed, with a vast braid that speaks of many battles fought and won. He has a body that is capable of great violence and carries a heavy sword. When she meets him, Daenerys is very afraid.

(She is not afraid for very long. She is clever, and kind, and she learns that her power is equal to his.)

Viserys is a coward, and will be a bad king. She knows this from a young age, but learns it again when he makes a drunken threat against her in the Dosh Khaleen, and she realizes that to him, family only ever meant as much as it could buy.

(He burns to death under an onslaught of molten gold, and she mourns her brother, but he was dead long before she killed the tyrant he had become.)

She learns her own power. She learns to ride, and to command, and to harbor loyalty in her subjects. She grows more beautiful by the day, and wears her hair in braids, long and thick, for she gains more victories every hour. Ser Jorah Mormont becomes her most devoted aide. Her maids come to love her as a sister. Her husband adores her, and he promises to take win seven kingdoms for her. She accepts all this as her due. She grows arrogant. She grows careless.

The sack of the Lhazareen town is a mistake. Daenerys suspects this as they begin, but convinces herself it is a necessary sacrifice; she is wrong, and it almost costs her everything.

(It is a foolish leader, write the historians, who cannot abide collateral damage, who refuses to negotiate with death; but how could Daenerys Stormborn do either, having seen what she has seen? Having suffered what she has suffered? The first time she allowed slaughter in the name of victory, the gods killed her husband and her child to teach her penance. She has been taught how cruelty returns, like a trained falcon, to its dealer.)

Daenerys has her husband cremated, in the manner of her house, and wades into the fire without fear. The flames embrace her like a lover, and she brings dragonfire back into the world.

On Ser Jorah’s advice, she goes to Astapor, to buy another army. It is not the first time she has seen slavery, but it is the first time that she has ever seen it as it is here, not merely a crime of one person against another, but a crime of a society against the many.

Here there are people who live in ways she could never imagine. Here there are people that no one in Westeros has ever spared a second thought for. Here there are people who have been reduced to numbers and abstractions in the minds of the millions of freemen on the other continent, who labored in the remains of the empire long after Valyria fell. Here there are horrors. Here there are things that turn her stomach; and she has watched grown men be murdered and disemboweled at her husband’s orders, and watched women be torn to pieces in the heat of combat, and watched her brother’s skull melt as he died screaming, but the things she sees in Astapor make bile rise in her throat.

She will never use slaves in her army.

(Daenerys cannot abide tyrants.)

Kraznys mo Nakloz, the owner of the Unsullied, uses a slave for his translator. It is this girl who interests Daenerys, far more than anything that the slave master spits his broken, disjointed Valyrian. The translator is young and dark and wears a thin blue dress, torn at the edges, and she wears her hair the same way Daenerys did when she was young. She speaks softly, and her smile is sweet, despite the bruises that peer from beneath her dress.

Daenerys knows she could strike a good deal for many of the Unsullied. But the translator’s eyes are wide and clear and clever, with a flicker of fire in the molten brown, her face is a vision of a young Targaryen, and Daenerys decides that she will kill the masters, every one of them.

The masters accept her false deal, and give her the translator as a gift. Daenerys takes her back to the ship, and she borrows Jorah’s sword to personally strike the chains from her wrists.

“You are free,” she says, bluntly, in Valyrian. “Go where you want. Live how you want. Stay with me, or run far away from this place. No one could blame you.”

“This one does not understand.”

“I release you from my service. You are not beholden to me. Go, if you want, or stay. But you owe nothing to anyone.”

The translator keeps her eyes down, quiet. “Do you not desire this one’s service?”

Daenerys touches her hand. She flinches like an animal so used to being hurt it cannot imagine a touch that does not bring pain.

“I do. But not as a slave. I would take you as my handmaid, but you would still be free.” 

“A handmaid, Your Grace?”

“Yes. You would translate for me, and eat from my table, and be at my side always, as my companion.”

The translator grows stiff. She says, “If that is what Your Grace desires of this one,” in very stilted, terribly polite Valyrian.

Then Daenerys remembers the Old Valyrian for  _companion_ , and it means—

“Not that way,” she says harshly. “No one may ask that of you. I will kill anyone who tries.”

The translator winces and recoils at the outburst. Daenerys aches with regret; she does not want to scare her. So she tries to be gentler. 

“What’s your name?” she asks.

“Your Grace?”

“Surely you don’t draw it out of a barrel every morning,” she adds lightly.

“Oh. No, Your Grace. That is only the Unsullied.”

“Your name is Oh?”

“No. Forgive this one, You Grace. This one’s name is Missandei.”

“Missandei,” said Daenerys. “A lovely name.”

“Thank you, Your Grace.”

She offers the translator a berth in her cabin that night, and draws her a hot bath, and then gives her some clothes from her own closet. And she offers her some silver bindings for her hair, to mark her as a member of Daenerys’ khal, if she so desires. But only if she desires it.

(Missandei watches the hands of her liberator, and marvels at this — a queen who looks like her, a queen who treats a slave with the kindness usually reserved for princesses and ladies, who cradles her head in her lap and sings songs in High Valyrian and teaches her how to weave her hair, showing her the braids for courage, for victory, for strength. This is a queen she could serve willingly, she thinks. Here is a woman she could follow into death and beyond.)

The next morning, she goes to the Plaza of Pride to make her trade with the slave master. The dothraki ride ahead and behind her, along with her retinue. Missandei rides at her left. The bargain before her is immense. A dragon for an army. A legion of slaves, to take back the continent she lost.

Viserys would have made the deal. Aerys would have, too. Perhaps even Aegon would have. The Targaryens were not all heroes; but neither were they all tyrants. 

(Much has been made of the Targaryen madmen. The gods tossed a coin when Daenerys was born, true enough. But she did not simply let it fall. She caught it in flight, and now she shows the world what side she chose.)

Daenerys calls down holy fire, and the masters burn alive.

The Targaryens are descendants of the great dragonlords of Old Valyria, heirs of the first men to master monsters, and six thousand years of noble blood flows through their veins. They are strong-willed and charismatic and beautiful and brilliant, and Daenerys is the best of them. She is the queen who would smooth the tears from a little girl’s face, and offer water to a dying slave, and visits those dying of disease to comfort them, and takes a city that means nothing to her conquest because she knows how the unluckiest within it live. Daenerys’ heart is a pyre that burns like the volcanic core of Valyria. She is clever, and she is noble, and she is kind. She is these things because she decides to be, and because they are her birthright, too.

They say the Dragon Queen is the most beautiful woman in the world. They say she travels with a host of hundreds of thousands, men and women who follow her not because of blood ties or ancient vows, but because they love her so fiercely they would willingly cross the world in her wake. They say that the Dragon Queen has hatched three dragons, the first to be born in over a hundred years, through an act of magic so extraordinary it seems the gods themselves have named her worthy of a throne.

They say her handmaid is a free woman of Naath, and her general is a former member of the Unsullied, and that atop her eldest dragon, she looks like Visenya reborn. They say that she has gathered a following of warriors, penitents, merchants, civilians, and all who come to her are welcomed into her ranks. They say she is a nation unto herself. This is what the historians will write of her, Daenerys Targaryen, the Breaker of Chains.

Two hundred thousand walk free in Astapor that night, and their queen rides on their shoulders, laughing. They say her crown is woven from a thousand silver-studded braids, and her skin is like the nurturing brace of night that holds each star.


End file.
